Paper Mario vs. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto

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From the very beginning, Mario's RPG adventures have encountered hurdles courtesy of his creator.

By Richard George

When Square first envisioned Mario in a RPG, its designers sketched Nintendo's iconic plumber wielding a sword - and riding a horse. When that proof of concept passed Shigeru Miyamoto's desk, he rejected the idea. Why? The notion of Mario on a horse, with a sword, didn't make much sense. He suggested a hammer as a weapon might make more sense - and thus was born the more familiar, paper-based approach to Mario's RPG adventures.

That protection of the Mushroom Kingdom didn't end decades ago. As developers from Intelligent Systems and Vanpool worked on what would eventually become Paper Mario: Sticker Star for the Nintendo 3DS, they were repeatedly shut down by Miyamoto, who (rightfully) serves as Nintendo's ultimate authority when it comes to gameplay quality.

Sticker Star has actually been in the works since the end of 2009, prior to the 3DS's formal unveiling at E3 2010. Why the long development? According to the game's developers, their original approach was far more in line with its predecessors, working with the more basic RPG design of its predecessors. But when he played a demo of the game just after E3 2010, Miyamoto rejected the team's design, saying the Paper Mario prototype was effectively "just a port of the GameCube version."

And from that, the sticker idea was born.

Check out the very first concept art for Paper Mario 64.

"Originally, the plan was to use stickers here and there for solving puzzles on the overall map and so forth," said producer Kensuke Tanabe, in a discussion with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. "But then we thought, 'If we're gonna do that, then we might as well use stickers for the whole thing, including battles,' and we decided to begin rethinking the game mechanics."

But that wasn't the team's only encounter with Miyamoto. Flash forward nearly a year, to the spring of 2011. The team, armed with stickers, approached Nintendo's executive with a new demo for approval. This time the feedback was almost worse. Rather than dismissing the 3DS Paper Mario as a port, Miyamoto labeled the game simply as "boring."

And that wasn't the last time either. According to Tanabe, "We have no shortage of the anecdotes in that nature. What we can reveal today are only a fraction of them!"

Miyamoto's advice ranged across a variety of topics, from the team needing to significantly change the game's atmosphere, to worrying less about story while making sure the game focused entirely on the existing Mario world. In other words - no new characters.

Sticker Star met many Miyamoto-based obstacles.

As strange as some of those directives sound, they actually helped the team. "We looked at the characteristics of a portable game that can be played little by little in small pieces and packed in lots of little episodes and ideas," said Taro Kudo, the game's director and employee of Vanpool, whose credits reach back to working on Square's Mario RPG. "I always did like putting in little ideas, so I actually enjoyed it."

The more the team threw out its original RPG design, the more the stickers took control of the game's design, and concepts like "Thing Stickers" and the Sticker Museum were created. According to the developers, Paper Mario: Sticker Star quickly came together from that point on, with the team finding a new sense of energy from the game's narrower, fresher focus.

Rich is an Executive Editor of IGN.com and the leader of IGN's Nintendo team. He also watches over all things WWE, Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed and much more. Follow him on Twitter, if you dare!